These two patrician French musicians were leading lights at American Columbia from the 1940s until well into the 1960s. During World War II, violinist Zino Francescatti and pianist Robert Casadesus began performing as a duo (they were both also collaborators with Ravel early in the careers), and in the decades since then the Columbia/Sony catalogue has documented this partnership distinguished by interpretive grace and technical polish. Although Francescatti is probably best remembered for his wide-ranging concerto recordings with Bernstein, Ormandy and Bruno Walter and Casadesus for his sparkling Mozart concertos with Szell, their duo recordings were also greatly admired by music lovers, especially their landmark interpretations of the Beethoven Violin Sonatas. The first of these recordings – made in mono between 1949 and 1957 in New York, when both musicians were living in the US – comprised Nos. 3–9. A remake, this time the complete cycle, was recorded in stereo in Paris in 1958 and 1961. Now Sony Classical is reissuing all of these performances in a single 7-CD box set.

All of their recordings of Beethoven violin sonatas were held in the highest critical esteem. The mono recordings earned special praise from Gramophone in the UK for expressiveness without undue romanticism and from High Fidelity in the US for an equality between the two musicians not often found in recordings of these works. Similar plaudits for the stereo versions, Gramophone commending Francescatti’s “cool, relaxed ease and sweet tone [in the “Spring” Sonata] … Casadesus is wonderfully good, too … The playing is effortless and relaxed in the true chamber music way … Both in this [Op. 96] and the C minor Sonata they give the kind of limpid, poetic classical performances in which every detail falls miraculously into place. This is playing with a lifetime of musical experience behind it … The perspective is faultlessly calculated; but of course not even the best engineer in the world could have produced such a result without a ‘marriage of true minds’ between the performers.” High Fidelity’s reviewer referred to the players’ “general tendency towards objective clarity, rhythmic brio, and superb instrumental refinement … The entire set – flawlessly well articulated, cleanly reproduced, and with every element of Beethoven’s writing meticulously set into proper perspective – can be highly recommended.”

The new box contains two performances never before issued: the duo’s 1957 New York recordings of the “Spring” Sonata and of Op. 30 No. 1, which were apparently withheld because of the imminent commencement of the cycle’s complete remake in stereo.

The German Romantic classics - Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler - had been central to Bruno Walter's middle years, but his life-long devotion to Mozart grew in his “post-retirement” days, beginning in 1958.

From 1958 to 1961, he recorded 55 works in the reverberant acoustic of Hollywood's American Legion Auditorium. Only the chorale finale of Beethoven's Ninth proved unsatisfactory, so Walter made one more trip to New York, this time with an East Coast version of the Columbia Symphony and the Westminster Symphonic Choir.

This box set of stereo recordings - with remasterings previously released in Bruno Walter - The Complete Columbia Album Collection - brings together some of the most treasured symphonic works of Mozart and Haydn, including two of Mozart's violin concertos played by the great French virtuoso Zino Francescatti.

Pianist and music teacher Artur Balsam was born in Warsaw on February 8, 1906. He attended the Helena Kijenska-Dobkiewiczowa Conservatory (now Academy) of Music established at the beginning of the 20th century in the Polish city of Lodz. After that he went to the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where he continued his studies with Artur Schnabel. A mere 12 years elapsed between his concert debut in 1918 and his success at the 1930 Berlin International Piano Competition; shortly after winning that competition, he was awarded the Mendelssohn Prize for chamber music in 1931 in Munich. Balsam matured into a sought-after partner at the piano: having won the Mendelssohn Prize together with the violinist Roman Totenberg, he toured the USA the following year with the brilliant young Yehudi Menuhin. After the rise to absolute power in Germany of Adolf Hitler at the head of his Nazi party, Balsam emigrated to the United States. He settled in New York in 1940, made a name for himself on the American chamber music scene and was the favorite accompanist of many famous soloists, especially in the years from 1940 to the early Seventies of the last century. He frequently partnered the great violinists Nathan Milstein and David Oistrakh, also playing for Joseph (violin) and Lillian (viola) Fuchs, Leonid Kogan (violin), Zino Francescatti (violin), Pierre Fournier (cello) and Mstislav Rostropovich (cello). Balsam was the pianist of the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini for five years. He was also a piano soloist for other leading orchestras.

Francescatti who was a year younger than Heifetz, was among the foremost violinists of the mid-20th century, from about 1935 to 1975. In the words of critic Henry Roth, there was "a special character, a vitality and a savoir faire to his playing that set him apart from a host of gifted virtuosi who possessed vibrant sound and creditable musicianship." The concert performances collected here, all of them previously unissued, provide good examples of his Italianate lyricism and ravishing tone.